Dealing with Riki

Riki’s terrorizing pubs across all skill levels and it doesn’t look like the usual mantra of “just get detection” is working. We’ve already discussed why the hero is as good as he is, so today our main focus is going to be on dealing with this annoying hero.

Identifying the threat

One of the big problems with Riki is that he can be played in both support and core positions, and these two roles are distinct enough to require different adaptations from your team. Check the enemy profile, deduce from picks—it doesn’t matter how, but you need to know what kind of Riki you are facing, with one or preferably two picks still open for your team.

Support

Support Riki is greedy, he is still sub-par in lane and, while annoying, can be dealt with through good positioning and map awareness. As long as you have a general idea of where the hero is, you can play aggressively on a lane he is unlikely to be in, while getting more conservative on a lane he rotates to.

His greed can also be matched with heroes like Bounty Hunter and Slardar, who are both great counters to Riki and are decent in the current meta, if your opponent plays greedily. BH allows you to outfarm the opponent and makes grouping up early a lot more economically viable. He also allows for very quick Force Staff and that item is always good and amazing against Riki. Slardar is an ok laner and can support his offlane relatively well, while posing a threat to the enemy core.

Don’t allow the hero to snowball, generally play conservatively and Riki will face the same problem most roamers face in the current meta—he will fall off and will have hard time catching up.

Core

Playing against core Riki is quite different. While Support Riki is greed incarnate, core Riki generally wants to be active on the map as soon as he gets his first couple of items and talents. His lane weakness is also somewhat mitigated by the ability to last hit creeps without ever losing invisibility, so the hero will generally get some farm regardless of your efforts.

Against core Riki you want a lineup who can match or survive through his aggression. The hero farms excruciatingly slow, so as long as you are not actively feeding him, he will start to fall behind. Another very important part of playing against core Riki is the ability to defend your towers. Riki himself doesn’t push too fast, so you will generally have time to react.

This prevents Riki from getting much needed map control and safe space. As soon as your map starts shrinking tower-wise, you will need to start spending more gold on vision and detection, while Riki will have more angles to attack from and will have more pathways, where there is a chance he will remain undetected.

Group up and push, but prioritize defending your own towers. Play conservatively as long as you don’t have some defensive options on both your cores and your supports and, most importantly, don’t feed. Only go for the highground pushes and base destruction once you are absolutely sure there is no way for the enemy to fully isolate a target. And have vision prepared around the area, where you want the fights to happen.

Flexible laning

Riki is dominant in all lanes, except for when he is played in the safelane or roaming. One thing you can do is swapping lanes—both support and core Riki are at their best when facing the enemy carry, who isn’t as much of a kill threat and wants to farm, so don’t give him that opportunity. It is hard to remain undetected and pull off a surprise unconventional laning against a hero with permanent invisibility, but the payoff is worth it.

Aggressive trilanes are also worth considering, as long as your team is on the same page. There are several heroes who are quite capable of standing against a 1+Riki lane, while your trilane can punish the enemy core, secure item progression for your carry and be relatively protected against Riki ganks. Sometimes trying to salvage a lane lost during the drafting stage is inferior to trying to make the game miserable for both sides.

Detection Usage

Riki is a drain on your team’s resources. While core heroes can generally outfarm Riki by hitting creeps, supports will always struggle. Both cores and supports have to understand that and play accordingly: you can’t die unnecessarily against Riki.

To do that, you need items on your supports, but they also need to buy detection. As core players, you can alleviate some of the pressure, by occasionally buying Dust yourself. It is especially important on heroes with gap closers and chase potential. You can’t rely on a single, low mobility, underfarmed hero on your team having detection.

You also absolutely need to be in close proximity to each other as long as you don’t know where Riki is. It saves your team a lot of gold, as you need less sentries if you play one side of the map. And it saves your teammates from dying, or at least allows for return kills.

What we often see professional players do in general, and against Riki specifically, is sacrifice a full lane, generally their offlane, and play around mid and safelane. This way your sentries do more for less gold.

Still try to defend you structures, when necessary, especially in the early game, but don’t go pushing a lane, if you sentries were already committed on the other side of the map.

Itemization

By playing conservatively with your detection and playing around it to maximize effectiveness, you can actually save up some money to get actual items even as supports. Force Staff is generally going to be your number one priority, but depending on the game Glimmer Cape, Ghost Scepter and Aeon Disk can all be great.

Don’t look for ways to win more with aggressive items. Your main goal in a game against Riki is to stabilize, outfarm and outscale. As long as there aren’t many unnecessary deaths and gold fed, Riki should be less of a problem.

Be very aware of level 20 powerspike for the hero, since it increases the initiation and escape range for a crazy amount. End the game before support Riki gets there or play extra carefully against core Riki in the mid-late game. Any isolated target without a Force Staff support is a freebie.

well i play a lot of riki... and when i dont i end up against a riki XD

i feel like predicting his movements help a lot.
In a team fight what does riki want .
Every body knows whom he will jump on first.
As is he cant kill any hero without right clicking him 2 times at least .. this might let u disable him .
Also the moment you catch him he is dead. :)

haha I would be so happy every time someone picks a bounty hunter to counter me as Riki. BH is only good if you can actually get kills (which is difficult since literally has 1 ability that does 300 dmg and nothing else)

By group up, I mean stay near each other. Not stand as 5 on top of each other. Your team will need sents and forcestaffs to save each other. Items like force don't save yourself on its own because riki can just naturally build nulli so your team will need multiples. Forcestaff is just a good item in general anyway so its not going out of your way too much on a lot of heroes. Riki also hates roots early and mid game so taking advantage of that with dusts makes him very easy to kill if hes not with his whole team. Riki likes to play in the enemy teams safelane jungle, so placing wards with sents in the areas you know he's gonna play lets you position yourself much better. Need to think proactively in every game of dota, not just vs a riki. Riki was never broken, just easily abusable. All the nerfs to the meta heroes made him seem really good in lower level pubs. Hopefully people will stop bitching at me personally for always first picking riki. lol

From a BH player: you don't pick bh counters, Riki, that is a double edge cuz if he buy gem you are screwed. And unlike riki which has a blink out escape, BH doesn't until he has force staff or blink. Just buy sentry when pushing or jungling.

How to counter riki? Patch 7.19d! Just kidding, dust and sentries are costly, but go far in low mmr. Great insight in the article concerning "forfeiting" a lane in order to better secure mid/safe - towers have true sight! Just keep the wave back far enough that when riki goes in, it's always a dive. Also, a counter that nobody has mentioned - Silver edge. Prevent his passive, and you have 4 seconds to touch him as much as you want. With his low health pool it shouldn't be too much of an issue, right? (kappa)

In other news,

Currently the Enchanted Mango has a 31.16% win rate. This is a tragedy. Whether being accidentally used while still in fountain or used just in time for that clutch nyx stun saving your teammate's life, it has always made memorable game impacts. It is our duty and responsibility as fellow gamers and members of this community to give the item the win rate it deserves. Thank you in advance for your support.

Correct me if I'm wrong here but isn't it acceptable for a BH to buy gem as well? I'm not saying it's a perfect solution but it seems like the period of time that riki has his cover blown is worth picking the BH. I don't play much BH or Riki myself, but I would also assume that you aren't purchasing a gem until well after your level six on either hero, so there is a large window of time where BH has a far better vision game opportunity, which, incidentally, is the window that Riki purportedly needs to snowball. Sure, you can get killed by Riki and Riki can escape, but isn't that true of a lot of heroes that it's fine to pick BH against?

@MM.Ugh Brock Hall But once BH died and gem were dropped It's hard to get it back since BH don't even know that he was followed
and any plain ward or sent will be destroy easily by culling blade. And if he got decent item like manta or dagger a chance to kill or catch him are even lower.
Only player with brain and not greedy will buy sent which is support that almost have no money in their wallet and then get destroy by culling blade in the end.
It's okay if got something back from that ward but if not just ping and say good bye to 100 gold.

I'm having a little trouble understanding exactly what you're saying so I apologize for that. I don't know, it just doesn't seem all that bad of a pick to me. I mean, sure there is the possibility of a pickoff, but that seems to be more of a risk of buying gem in general more than specifically on bounty (really a risk of playing bounty in any game), and if you know riki is in the game you're gonna play a little safer while holding that gem and work to remove sentries with it. Besides, track has a range of 1200 at the start, and Riki has to wait for his talent to get that kind of range. Until his talent, he can't get more than 900 (if he has aether for some reason). In the race to achieving gem, it feels like Track provides the advantage with better kill opportunities for your teammates, lower chance of being caught out by an invisible Riki, and a higher influx of gold opportunity (assuming the riki is playing support as he isn't likely to buy gem in carry position).

Again I'm not saying it's perfect, but it seems like most of the issues are less hero related and more player related. I would definitely say it will require a higher degree of skill to pull off, but in the right hands sit still seems like a pretty effective pick.

Still interested in your input Chickadee, would you say it's a difficult counter to pull off?

@MM.Ugh Brock Hall
It's not a bad pick but the hero itself is weak only thing he can do is track and about 300 dmg skill. He can't do frequent engage due to his invisibility skill cd unlike riki who have more mobility and more chance to engage or disengage from opponent.
By the time support BH got gem riki already got diffusal blade+dust which make BH very juicy target.

I agree that Track give a lot of advantage but he need to be on aggressive teammate to get reliable kill and money, If he's on passive farming team BH will not have enough money to get item since he can't solo kill anyone.
I'll say "Give gem to tank hero or hero with survival ability" is better choice than pick BH and wait for his lvl6 Track.

I was assuming we were giving BH the benefit of a well crafted team draft but yes currently BH is mostly relegated to a surprise last pick which doesn't suit him very well. I think having track available also really stunts rikis ability to disengage as he currently cannot blink to an ally so in that way it's a threat leveraging skill, similar to the threat of black hole (smaller scale obv). Basically riki has to make sure BH is out of the picture before taking on a risky engagement and that could curtail his enthusiasm. It would basically be dust if not for the fact that it's cheaper, far lower cooldown, and provides a boost in gold. How well the team handles early engagements is likely the biggest factor that is up in the air, and based solely on this matchup without any other factors, the team that gains an advantage pre-6ish is probably going to dictate the rest of the match.

We are definitely in agreement that BH is weak right now so this is mainly an exercise in theorycrafting for me but I do appreciate your willingness to discuss the pros and cons. Currently the tank gem and force staff will allow your team to be a little more flexible in their draft rather than trying to drag dead weight around until the track gold comes in. In another meta, with only numbers changes, nothing drastic, I'd say BH would be a lot more worth it.

The nerfs hurt, but I feel the numbers are still too high and people are crying. It's as if all the cry babies thought he was perfectly balanced before, and don't realize that despite the nerfs, his skill set is still insanely well synergistic.

Let's take a look at the nerfs:

Smoke Screen->This skill was hit the hardest aside from his ult. It has a WHOPPING 2% less MS slow at level 1, but ultimately 5% less at level 4. This is not hero destroying however. The % miss rescaling is more harsh to be honest, but this is still a 1 point wonder until later on because it still has 6s silence duration, 325 AOE at level 1.

Blink Strike->Cast range talent may have been nerfed, but 1500 cast range is still insanely good even if 1700 is better. Imagine if 700 was the original talent, people would cry if it got nerfed, and would have called 700 cancer.

Tricks of the Trade->Duration is the same at level 1, but ultimately 1 second less at level 3. Get an Aghs, it's 9 seconds and still insanely long. The AOE and the talent AOE were both nerfed, but if a hero gets disabled in the ult they're just as dead as ever.

These nerfs were good and fair, I don't think anything here dumpstered the hero.

I know I'm being all nosy nosy in this comment section, I'm sorry! Ok that's out of the way.

Back in the days of old Cancer Lancer, his illusions received a nerf on damage output from 25% to 20% and people said "oh that's not so bad it's only 5%". I think it was Draskyll (but not positive) that said it's a poor way of looking at the balance change because you have to look at percentage values as hard numbers like any other spell. In other words, if the illusions were doing 10 dmg each before and now they are doing 8 dmg, that's a 20% reduction, not 5%. Applying that logic to the smoke screen nerfs that's a 20% reduction in slowing (meaning you can walk out of smoke screen in 20% less time) and a 75% miss chance reduction.

It's another discussion entirely if you think the nerfs are not enough, but I'd venture to guess this is the perspective some of those criers are looking at the situation.

7.19d did nothing. The second riki gets diffusal he's a god. I play him in the four role, still manage to win my lane with coordination and I go roam and win the other lanes. I just try to be everywhere. He's especially good against popular heroes in this meta like ursa and tiny who get destroyed by smoke cloud. Although idk how much my opinion counts, I'm 3 wins away from Ancient 1 trash

I have 34 wins and 14 loses on riki, 7.19d didnt destroy him, i can still play him normally despite being nerfed, and also if u want to dominate the game atleast build Phase boots, Aquila + Wraith band and Diffusal within 18-20min and start fucking your enemy and let them suffer, even if they ward they cant do shit once smoked or even if they have force staff, i just wait they use force staff once i blink in and cast diffusal + smoke combo ez, common targets are support and midlanners, especially Storm, Ember, Invo and QoP. And the best way to counter riki is to buy wards in the early and fuck him all the way and also play as riki and know his strengths and weaknesses.

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